Felix Atagong's Unfinished Projec

December 2009

20091205

Z for Zeitoun

It was freezing cold this morning and exactly this week clothing
manufacturer H&M
decided to adorn the railway stations with some lingerie publicity that
made me even shudder harder when I passed the semi-naked fleshy
skeletons that pretended to have a good time. In the name of science I
had a good look at them and decided that two models glued together would
make a normal looking woman with the necessary accessories to put some
lingerie around (and then, as I am – but – a man, take it back off).

Although there is an anti-skinny movement going on for a couple of
decades now the haute-couture and fashion world doesn't seem to be
interested and carries on promoting an anorexic lifestyle. When Photoshop
Disasters published a promotional picture of a model whose picture
had been so maltreated that her hips actually were smaller than her head Ralph
Lauren immediately attacked the blog for copyright infringement and
its internet provider removed the post without even asking if Ralph
Lauren had made a valid point or not (it wasn’t but the image still
hasn’t reappeared nearly 3 months later). The new censorship dictators
no longer carry the title prince, king or emperor they are now called
CEO and lawyers throwing crap
from sad green mountains have become their licensed fools.

Later on Photoshop Disasters published a second
Ralph Lauren publicity, but this time the company didn’t respond anymore
as their previous reaction had backfired,
mainly because other blogs, especially Boing
Boing, newspapers and television stations had jumped in to the
rescue thus creating a so-called Streisand
effect. If you have a couple of hours to spend just do a Google search
and enjoy. It is also rather dubious that Ralph Lauren never found it
necessary to apologize to Photoshop Disasters, nor Boing Boing, but
prefers to send silly press statements to the world about how
misunderstood they are.

Thank god, dog or blog we have democracy and freedom of speech. So we
think, I was a big believer of the nivellement par le bas theory
in my progressive twenties (suddenly the name Habermas
flashes through the mist in my brain) but when the first fat rolls
started to grow on my body that had a reverse proportional effect on my
ideological beliefs as well. Now that I have turned 50 I’m back full of
anger and angst and the future looks as gloomy as when I was 18.

I used to ironically quip how (Bush ruled) United States of America slid
more and more towards the direction of that big fat, but nevertheless
undernourished, ancient enemy of theirs the Union of Soviet Socialist
Republics. It isn’t irony anymore.

Both countries basically had a rigid one party system with an infallible
but often slightly demented leader at the top. Both countries used a
‘common enemy’ to enhance nationalistic feelings, anyone opposing or
even debating that issue was considered unpatriotic and measures where
then taken to remove the unpatriotic elements from society. In the USSR
you disappeared in a mental institute or a Gulag archipelago, in the USA
– being a capitalistic driven society – it was mostly enough to sack the
person from his/her job, although there are enough examples of American
citizens that have been imprisoned for ‘unpatriotic’ behavior. I
recently came across Dave
Eggers’s non-fiction book Zeitoun
and it enraged me at a point that I had to take physical distance from
the novel from time to time.

The book meticulously describes how Abdulrahman
Zeitoun, an American citizen, stays behind after the hurricane Katrina
disaster, peddling with his canoe through the inundated streets and
helping citizens who didn’t or couldn’t flee the city and who were
eagerly waiting for official help organizations that would never arrive,
as if the USA was one of those third-world countries who can’t look
after their people after a tragedy.

As a devout Muslim Abdulrahman finds it his task to help wherever he
can, but one day he gets arrested, in true Mad Max style by
self-appointed police officers, and deported to a nearby prison camp.

Zeitoun is put in an iron cage (!) that ASPCA
would find unsatisfactory for animal transport and is accused of
terrorist activities. How on Earth an Al
Qaeda terrorist would plot satanic plans, peddling in a canoe, by
helping old ladies from the roofs of their inundated houses, remains a
mystery, but from then on the story, although it is not a story - but
hallucinatory fact, gets Kafkaesque proportions. Zeitoun literally
disappears from Earth, is refused a lawyer, his family is not informed
of his imprisonment and they are led to believe he has drowned trying to
protect his property. If this had happened in the USSR we’d call it
Stalinist and rightly so.

Zeitoun, falsely accused, repeatedly insulted, (verbally) abused,
emotionally and physically tortured, was not the only citizen doing Katrina
time says Dave Eggers, and all-in-all Abdulrahman was still quite
lucky:

There were hundreds of people that did months in jail, and I'm sure
there are dozens of cases of prisoners who did over a year in various
jails and prisons around Louisiana, where no one even knew where they
were. It's unprecedented in American history, (…) I think there was a
dark age, right in the middle there, from 2003 to 2006 especially, when
anything seemed possible and nothing was surprising. (Taken from: Salon)

Zeitoun’s unnecessary persecution didn’t turn him onto a Muslim
terrorist; quite the contrary. He seems to see the whole episode as a
weird test and has forgiven his persecutors. He tries to persuade
himself and his entourage that the whole process has strengthened him as
a religious individual and as an American citizen who, as everybody
else, watches Pride and Prejudice with his family. While a droopy
dog-eyed George Bush was firing one-liners to television cameras around
the world Abdulrahman Zeitoun saved over two-hundred New Orleans
citizens trapped by the water. The American government rewarded him by
putting him in a dog cage and by refusing him the most elementary human
rights, including medicial treatment for his wounds.

20091213

Desiderata

Since a couple of weeks the dating simulator ArianeB, also known as
Ariane Barnes or Virtually Date Ariane and even Ariane Brodie (sorry,
just adding these synonyms to get a higher Google ranking), has been
upgraded to version 6.1.

The changes have been applied to the html pages alone and as far as I
could check no images have been tampered with. Apart from some bug fixes
the story is identical to that of version 6.0. The main difference is
that Ariane’s responses, which - up till now - were only visible as tooltips
on the images by moving the mouse over the appropriate area, are now
reflected as well in the bottom text area.

For the original overview of the changes you can always check the Life
in the Metaverse blog.

I will not end this post by saying that the walkthrough of version 6.1
will come any day now, as I still didn’t find the time to investigate
the different new scenario’s of version 6.0 (nor 6.1). But I did play
version 6.0 a few times and I immediately came home with a toaster!

Let me say that my wild friendship with ArianeB has temporarily tempered
a bit, and the arrival of several new characters at Shark’s Lagoon will
certainly not help remediate that.

Desire and Submission

Shark, from Shark’s
Lagoon, has once done it again and leaves us with a nice Christmas
bonus. He has teamed up with a few people from the Shark’s Lagoon forum
and together they came with a new flash game called Desire and
Submission, an adult sim exploring the boundaries of BDSM,
but always staying within the limits of Shark’s universe, meaning that
the adventure is rather witty than offensive or vulgar.

Shark’s games are a mixture of point and click simulation adventures,
graphic novels and/or interactive movies. The story develops in the
usual way, with people talking to each other through text balloons and a
next button to proceed to the following scene. It is advised not to skip
the texts as some contain hints for later on, but you can scroll rapidly
through the different panels by clicking on the space where the ‘next’
button arrives, even if it is not visible.

Once in a while the story is halted, the mouse pointer changes into a
circle and it is up to the player to trigger the following events. As
such the game resembles those classic point and click adventures like Day
of the Tentacle, but of course Shark’s latest asset is not about a
bunch of teenagers careening through space and time, deep-freezing and
microwaving hamsters en passant. Desire and Submission contains
adult topics, adult topics we adults like so much that we can’t have
enough of them. Well, some of us do.

In Shark’s earlier creations a single click would start a next scene,
but in this game there are quite a few puzzles where so-called
combo-clicks, in the right order and inside a limited time frame, have
to take place. There are also some interesting sidesteps, if the player
takes the wrong decision for instance, the story will continue for a
while and will only reveal a dead end after some further developing
situations have taken place. Personally I liked one alternative ending
so much that I would like to see it develop into a parallel universe, so
to speak.

People who are not used to Shark’s games (and the way they work) may
have some problems initially; I have ‘grown up’ with Shark’s earlier
incantations and know how they have been evolving, from release to
release, always towards the better. This last effort is, undoubtedly,
his best creation ever. Lagoon games have that certain cartoonish 3D
style that makes me wonder if this is the kind of thing the Thunderbirds
were doing after hours.

As usual the Shark’s Lagoon forum has dedicated a thread
to the game were subtle hints are dispersed over its 25 pages or so,
members have been informed not to give too much away as this will take
away the fun of the game, so asking for the password to get to the
second episode of the game will simply be ignored, if you are lucky (if
you are unlucky you will get a spank for help).

Shark’s last has evolved into a real interactive story and has been
separated in two different episodes (with hopefully more to come). Part
1, Alancy, shows how the fresh wife of a nobleman is introduced
in the strange ways of French nobility, including whips and dungeons.
When the first episode has been ended to the satisfaction of all parties
a password is revealed that can be used to start the second episode, Florian,
but if no password is revealed the game has switched over to an
alternative ending, that is also fun to play, but will not lead to
success.

Talking about success, Shark’s games are not only getting better from
release to release but are also gaining in popularity. The downside of
this all is that since "desire and submission" is on-line, the website
is very slow. The visitors are increasingly numerous in the lagoon and
the server cannot respond all the requests.”

The website has increased from about 2000 visitors a day during the Sweet
Alison days to its tenfold. So Shark has now got to think about the
possibility to move his site to a bigger server that will obviously cost
more money. Shark's games have always been freeware, but he did accept
donations through PayPal, but this account has recently been closed, due
to PayPal's shady politics of ‘diffusing
of sexual contents’.

Bad luck never comes alone.

Desire and Submission can be found at Shark’s
Lagoon. The games can also be downloaded and these downloads have
better graphics than the on-line versions. Unfortunately these files are
hosted on Rapidshare, a website that has the most misleading name ever.
Getting the files tempt to be a rather quirky business and are very very
very slow. Episode 1: Alancy takes about 33 MB and episode 2: Florian
around 41 MB.

20091225

And Another Thing... or two...

I am not very fond of the end of the year, partly because everybody
wants you to be happy, which I am, by definition, not. Another recurring
nightmare are the end of the year lists that are published everywhere
and the New Year’s resolutions for the coming year.

So I had decided not to publish such a list, but then…

OpenTTD 1.00

OpenTTD,
probably the best game in the world, has put a first beta for version
1.0.0 on their website. With this version you can run OpenTTD without
the original Transport
Tycoon Deluxe data files, although you can still use them.

Another gem from the past (1997) is Theme
Hospital by Bullfrog Productions. The game has been imitated a
couple of times but these attempts were always worse than the original.
For a couple of years several projects have attempted to create an Open
Source version of the game and (some of) these different projects
have been described on this blog before. Most of these projects have
died a lonely death for the simple reason that a man (or woman) alone
can’t cope with the ten thousands lines of coding such a huge project
needs.

For the moment I am aware of three simultaneous Open
Theme Hospital projects that share the same blog
and forum:
OpenTH, Java Hospital and CorsixTH. (Finally people have understood that
it is better to bundle forces and start coding instead of making nice
and flashy websites that promise things that will never come.)

CorsixTH has now released a playable beta 1, making it the first open
source Theme Hospital clone to reach playable status. Representing five
months of development since the project launched, CorsixTH Playable Beta
1 implements many of the features of the original game, and runs
natively on Windows, Linux, and OS X. The intent of this release is to
increase awareness of CorsixTH, and to encourage more developers to
assist in the project.

Similar to how OpenTTD started, years ago, CorsixTH requires some of the
original game data files to provide graphics and sounds and some tweaking
needs to be done in configuration files, just like in the good old TTDpatch
days, although in my case it was just enough to add the line C:\Program
Files\Bullfrog\Hospital\ in the config.txt file.

Since the project went public on July 24th 2009 the core development
team grow from one person to four people. Despite this, the project is
looking for more developers to report bugs and submit code. Artists
interested in creating a new set of graphics, and hence removing the
dependency on the original game data, are also welcomed. (This last
phrase is perhaps wishful thinking, it took OpenTTD five (5!) years to
accomplish this and, according to Wikipedia, it is the 8th most active
Sourceforge project on this planet.)

Widelands
is an open source (GPLed) real-time strategy game. It is built upon the SDL
and other open source libraries and is still under heavy development.
Basically Widelands is a Settlers
II remake rather than a clone carrying its own graphics, sounds and
music. It is a project that is very alive and kicking.

In July I wrote about on Open Sim
Tower project and how it suffered from the same disease as a lot of
other game clones or remakes. The leader of the project, most of the
time a student, is very enthusiast, but fails to produce a downloadable
game, because real-life catches up with him: exams, girlfriend, work, a
home and a dog. This is no criticism, mainly an observation, but hours
after I had blogged about it I received a reply from the Open Tower
community with the clear message that I had exaggerated and that the
project was still very active.

Last week I checked again and found that the main website
of Open Tower had disappeared (it now leads to an OpenTower wiki)
and the forum
has been closed down due to lack of interest in development. It is not
the time of the season to joke about this all, simply an observation.

However, on top of the Open Tower wiki is a banner saying that their
project has got nothing to do with High
Rise Developer. My attention was grabbed and it appears to be - yet
another – attempt to create a Sim Tower style game. They have an 0.03
alpha which means that the project is still in a very early stage, but
at least some work has been done.

Sandbox
Of Gods was one of the freeware indie hits from 2004, the game
looked absolutely vintage, with tacky graphics and sounds, and that was
probably why it went in that well.

Basically you are a god (as in the man with the beard) and you can
choose if you will give humans or rabbits the chance to evolve into an
intelligent species. You can try to develop both species as well and the
final result will either end in a global nuclear war or in a peaceful
world where humans (probably all vegetarian) and rabbits are peacefully
living next to each other.

The walkthroughs for this game can be found on this blog and in only 5
runs you will have discovered all possibilities of this point’n click
sim. Of course playing by these walkthroughs takes most of the fun away,
as you should find out yourself, by trial and error, how an early
decision will develop thousands year later.

For years there were plans for a sequel, but these were never concrete
until this year when, out
of the blue, a SOG remaster was promised.

Basically there will be two SOG 1.5 versions:

An updated freeware version containing the following changes-
support for Windows 7 and Windows Vista- upgraded resolution-new
music and sound effects-a new save engine which allows for updates
and patches-a new options menu

A Remastered version, containing the freeware game and some extra games,
inspired by the original (this version will be given away, as a bonus
game, to existing Vertigo Games customers)-SOG boardgame: a
boardgame version of the Sandbox of God simulation using light gels,
clay figures, blocks and cards…-SOG warfare: where rabbits
plot to take over the world and attack the humans in a 20 level
turnbased strategic extravaganza

If all goes well SOG:R will be released on the last day of this year:
the 31st of December… suddenly the future does look bright…

20091231

iPod Random Generator December 2009

Sometimes I think that my iPod has a mind of its own, telepathically
connected to my own. I have literally made hundreds of radio programs in
my angry young days, but the daring combinations the iPod randomizer
presents me are quite spectacular and always always awe-inspiring.

Did it know it was the end of the year? The five last songs it presented
to me were:Mr. Tambourine Man, The Byrds followed byThe
Beatles’s All You Need Is Love.

Then came a suiting intermezzo with If I Could Change Your Mind from The
Alan Parsons Project (from their rather disappointing album Eve).

The last songs of the year, and damned if I do, were both from the same
artist, a bloke named Syd Barrett whose Baby Lemonade was followed by
Terrapin. Thus ended the year for my iPod.

The underneath graph gives the songs that were played the most this year
(or last year, if you will), and apart from the quite hideous
Vega-Tables from Brian Wilson’s Smile, I’m still not sure if I have to
praise or to hate that album, it’s a pretty fair bunch.

And because I have now reliable statistics from the last two years (and
obviously because I am a geek) I present you hereafter with an overview
of that. It is the combined top 20 from the top tens of 2008 and 2009.
The result is far from spectacular and up till now there is no
deductible pattern, but it cost me quite some time to make it, so I’ll
present it here anyway.

Next year all my iPod statistics will be reset to zero and a new set of
greatest hits will be randomly chosen. Welcome to the machine.

As always the playlist of the month will appear on my MySpace blog
and the overview of the year will be glued on my MySpace
entrance page. And for those who still want to know the how and what and
where and when I give you this old link: Random
Blueß aka sucking for statistics